Salon EA is a well-known high-quality beauty parlor located in Sofia, Bulgaria that has been offering its services to customers since 2012. During the last couple of years, the salon has built itself a name that is easy to remember and recognize on the market.
For this project we were asked to choose a business and create a digital solution where the product should be one that the company does not currently own/use.
Prior to this project, the salon had been relying on a third-party application (that allows users to choose from a variety of service providers in the area) to manage its booking system. This was in addition to their bookings made via phone or email. As a result of that its profits had decreased.
A survey done in relation to this project shows that most people usually make appointments outside of business hours and the way they like to do this is online. Having taken the current situation and research data into consideration I have developed a mobile booking application to assist the salon’s booking process. In the long run the app could boost Salon EA's sales, improve its marketing efficiency and create a loyal customer base. It also gives the salon fair advantage due to its competitors not owning one.
The EA app helps customers avoid waiting, shortens the time of making an appointment and makes it easier to get one. Through its booking system users can read information about the desired service, check availability, schedule appointment/course bookings, pay, and later on come back and provide feedback based on their experience. At the same time the app makes it easier for employees to track and organize their activities.
<p-under-img>The app was designed in close collaboration with other designers and developers working on updating the salon’s website. During that time a new logo and a set of design guidelines were created to be used all over the salon’s digital and physical products. The main priorities when designing the app were simplicity, ease of use and improvement of the current booking experience.<p-under-img>
To design the app, Design Thinking was used in combination with other service design models to assess the current situation, analyze the service and local market and explore opportunity areas. This included a desktop research, in-depth interviews with the salon’s owner and customers, an online questionnaire, and a competitor analysis. Later on, the ideas were prototyped, tested and further developed based on the feedback from target group users.
In order to get some inspiration the other designers and I turned to Pinterest, Instagram, We heart it, and other websites. The pictures we downloaded were all somehow connected to beauty. The purpose here was to take a look at different color pallets, as well as textures. Among these photos were a few representing various interior designs.
Following that, we picked out the pictures that best represented the direction we wanted to go in. The first mood boards were created using messy layouts. However, instead of just adding all of the pictures we had downloaded together we wanted to find a way to create synergies between them.
After swapping the places of some of the colors and adding new ones we ended up with the final color palette.
After drawing up several different layouts of the pages and the main sections I started building the core structure of the pages. However, I only used simple shapes where I was going to place the images, text, and buttons. I did that just to get a slight idea what the future solution would look like.
Using only gray-scale shapes and lines I tried to recreate all of my original wireframes from scratch in Adobe XD. During the process, I removed some of the elements, then added new ones in order to create a better overview of the app. I tried to keep the design simple, lacking any specific colors. That was helpful later when creating and testing the first prototype. It also meant that I could get good unbiased user feedback since the user will not be distracted by images, fonts or colors.
In-between the wireframes and the first functional prototype are the mock-ups. In this process, there is less to do, since most of the hard work has already been done in the wireframing process. Here I just added the colors, figured out the typography, and inserted images and other visual elements to make the product more eye-catching.
